


I'll Be There When You Want Me

by SylvanWitch



Series: Ain't No Mountain High Enough [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 19:39:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12139647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Having a secret relationship when some of your friends and co-workers are trained spies is a mission for which Steve Rogers never trained.





	I'll Be There When You Want Me

**Author's Note:**

> The titles for this story and all the stories in this series are taken from Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's terrific, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." If there's a better paean to self-destructive, co-dependent, ultimately enviable love, I'm not sure what it is.
> 
> Also, thanks again to the awesome writers at the DW Write Every Day challenge. They made this story and series possible. Any errors are entirely my own fault, however.

Having a secret relationship when some of your friends and co-workers are trained spies is a mission for which Steve Rogers never trained.

When one of your friends makes regular forays into the ductwork and another is Natasha freakin’ Romanov, finding privacy is difficult at best.

When you’re on-call twenty-four/seven to save the world, finding time and privacy is nearly impossible.

The third time Steve skulks away from a hurried clinch with Tony to find one of their fellow Avengers in the kitchen or corridor or once—memorably—the gym locker-room (Tony still had mat-burns from that round), Steve resolves to talk to Tony about going public with their relationship.

That conversation goes about as he’d expected it would.

“No. No way.”

“Tony, c’mon. They’re our friends and teammates. They deserve to know. Besides, you’ve gotta figure some of them already do—Natasha’s the queen of spies, not to mention Barton’s habit of—.”

“‘Knowing’ isn’t the same as _knowing_ ,” Tony insists tautologically.

“What does that even mean?” Steve asks, but he actually doesn’t have to. He gets it; he does. Tony doesn’t want anyone to know because then he’d have to commit to something with Steve. There’d be the weight of pressure on their relationship, the assumption that it was serious.

And it’s not serious.

Steve tells himself that for another month of hurried gropes and breathless near-misses with the team.

If it weren’t for the super-soldier thing, he’d have circles under his eyes from the stress of keeping it all to himself, of not giving anything away in team meetings or during social gatherings. Tony’s bare feet alone can make Steve’s stomach flip. The way the hollow of his back broadens out into his tight, high ass makes his face hot. He can’t even look at Tony a lot of the time.

It’s a physical struggle not to let his feelings show on his face.

Tony seems to handle it all with a lot more grace, and finally Steve cracks.

One night—a rare quiet night in, just the two of them (Barton and Natasha off on a S.H.I.E.L.D. thing, Thor in Asgard, Bruce gone to the Adirondacks to “center himself”), in the sweaty afterglow, winded and damp, a miasma of sex hanging over the bed, Steve says, “I need to tell people about us.”

“Mnnnnhh,” Tony answers, burrowing his face further into Steve’s armpit. It should be gross, but in fact, it sends a spark of desire straight to his groin.

“Tony.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have used his _I’m the one in charge here_ voice, because Tony goes from sated to scathing in 30 seconds.

He’s out of the bed, gloriously naked, smeared with flaking come, hair a tangled nest, love-marks blooming in a collar low on his throat, and Steve forgets that he’d said anything at all until Tony says, “Look, Boy Scout, if you can’t handle doing this my way, then we can call it quits.”

Steve’s rekindling ardor fizzles as if dowsed with ice-water, the same ice-water turning his guts to a tingling river. He actually has to resist a shiver, which he manages. It buys him a few seconds of precious time to formulate a response.

When it comes, it surprises both of them.

“You don’t get to use breaking up with me as an ultimatum unless you really mean it.”

 _Huh_. He wonders how he got all that out around his heart, which is clogging the back of his throat, but he doesn’t have long to ponder it because Tony’s expression, which had been that brittle, flat affect he assumed any time someone scared him, sloughs away, to be replaced by something more genuine.

Tony Stark is scared: out-of-his-depth, freefalling-with-no-safety-Hulk, I-don’t-know-what-happens-next-how-can-I-not-know-something terrified.

Steve gets up to stand in front of Tony, but he doesn’t reach out. Too often, these brief skirmishes have resolved themselves in much longer and more vocal marathons of sex, but for as much as Steve enjoys Tony’s physical expressions, he’s getting a little tired of having to guess at the other kinds—emotional, intellectual, psychological.

It’s hard enough figuring out the language of this new world he’s awoken to. Trying to interpret Tony’s meaning from aggressive blowjobs and wanton keening is beyond him. They probably make movies that would help him make sense of it, but Steve guesses they’re sold in places like the one Barton tried to take him into a few weeks back, and, well, no.

“Look, we’ve stopped an alien invasion together, not to mention taken on Fury,” Steve notes. “We can definitely handle telling our friends about us. Unless you don’t want to because you’re looking for an excuse to bail…”

Now that it’s out there, Steve tries to swallow, but there’s a golf-ball lodged there, and a pressure behind his eyes makes him want to cover his face, but he can’t hide from this. If Tony’s ready to call it quits, then Steve needs to know that. Sooner is better than later, right? Tear off the bandage, jump in the deep end…

Platitudes swarm his brain from a hundred training videos, and none of them help. He can’t breathe; his heart has swollen, it _must_ be. The super-soldier serum is finally going bad on him. This is what it feels like when the heart gives out.

“Okay.”

Steve’s so focused on getting a breath into his iron-bound lungs that he doesn’t hear Tony at first.

Then—

“Okay, we can tell them, or okay we can break up?”

“Jesus, the first one. ‘ _Okay_ ’ you win. As usual.”

The line of Tony’s mouth suggests just how unhappy he is, and it’s more than his usual ill grace in conceding to someone else’s point of view. If it were only that, Steve would ignore it. But Tony’s expression is telegraphing something enormous and complex—something damaging to them both.

“I love you,” Steve blurts.

That…is not what he meant to say. But now that it’s said, he will own it, never mind that Tony’s face in the blue pall cast by the arc reactor has gone ghostly pale.

“I love you,” he repeats a little less desperately. He doesn’t feel less desperate, but he can at least try to act like a man here. Inside, he feels like the sickly little boy who got winded walking up a flight of stairs, but for Tony he can pretend to be strong.

Tony’s brought a shaking hand up in a gesture somewhere between stop and please. The arc reactor pulses unfeelingly, the only vibrant thing in a room gone unnaturally still.

“I won’t make you tell them if you don’t want to. It’s just that I love you—” _God, why can’t he stop saying that_ word _!_ —“and I want to sing it from the rooftops. But if you don’t—uh, love me, I mean”— _that infernal word again_ —“and if you really can’t stand the idea of anyone knowing about us, well…”

He stops, not because he’s run out of rambling room but because Tony’s hand is definitely signaling _stop_ , and as it’s the most assertive expression he’s offered in what feels like the most awkward millennia ever, Steve obeys, hopeful and afraid.

Tony isn’t looking at Steve. He’s wearing that thousand-yard stare Steve’s seen a handful of times since he’s known Tony. It’s a look he gets when he’s about to do something stupid and self-sacrificing.

He really doesn’t like that he’s put that look on Tony’s face.

“We can tell the team.” The words are clear enough, though spoken in a low, rough voice that makes Steve want to clear his own throat.

“But?” Déjà vu drags a skittering hand down Steve’s spine, and he shakes off the feeling that this exchange isn’t going to end in gales of uncontrollable laughter like the last one did.

Tony’s shrug is more like a shiver, involuntary and barely perceptible. He looks ill, worn out, like he’s surrendering to an enemy. “No buts. We’ll tell them tomorrow if you’d like.”

Tony still won’t meet Steve’s eyes, and Steve is suddenly aware of their mutual nudity, of the evidence of their passion dried on Tony’s belly and the way his own flaccid penis is sticking to the hair on his thigh.

Twenty minutes ago he was buried inside of Tony, so close he could feel the steady thump of Tony’s heartbeat through his cock. He was whispering nonsense words over Tony’s arched back, driving Tony up onto his fingertips with every heaving thrust.

He’d have sworn twenty minutes ago that they were so close, nothing could drive them apart.

“Forget it,” Steve says, trying to sound like it’s no big deal, like they haven’t just spoken the fatal incantation that killed their love before it could grow.

“No, you’re right. I should man up and be honest with the team. I should tell them that I’ve been letting the team leader fuck me at every opportunity, that I get down on my knees—literally—to suck off the World’s Greatest Boy Scout. In fact—Jarvis, throw together a slide show from my ‘private stock,’ set it to something by Sousa, it’ll be a huge hit at the next team meeting.”

“Tony, that’s not what I meant—”

But Tony is on a roll, implacable, unstoppable, and clench his fists though he might, there is nothing Steve can do to stop the flood of bile spewing from Tony’s kiss-fucked mouth.

“Or you know what, belay that, Jarvis—wouldn’t want to let our teammates in on how Tony Stark has dirtied up our national hero. Might get Cap banned from the comic books, not to mention Natasha would murder me in my sleep. But yeah, let’s tell ‘em, see how it goes. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Steve can’t stand to look at Tony by the end of the rant. His face is almost unrecognizable, twisted by bitterness and self-loathing. Instead, he stares at the floor between Tony’s feet and finds himself noticing the littlest things—the delicate blue filigree of veins above the strong arch of his foot and the symmetry of his toes and the rounded strength of his heel and the ball of his foot.

He follows that up to the impossibly fragile hollow of his Achilles’ heel, and it hits him squarely between the eyes, that allusion—the weakest point, the unprotected part of Tony is Steve himself.

He’s Tony’s greatest weakness.

But then, it’s true for Steve as well—he’d do anything for Tony. Anything, he realizes with a watery nausea slopping around his gut.

“Oh, God,” he breathes, barely more than an exhalation of air.

“Yeah,” Tony answers, that single syllable a knife’s edge, cutting the tension between them and leaving them empty and sagging under the weight of the truth.

Tony doesn’t say I told you so. He turns on his heel and heads for the ensuite bathroom, leaving the door open—as a taunt or an invitation, Steve’s not sure.

A minute later, he hears the shower go on and then the rumble of the glass door sliding open and closed.

There’s room enough for two in there. It doesn’t mean he has to touch Tony, doesn’t mean they’re going to bridge this divide between them the way they always do.

The part of Steve that recognizes that he’s rationalizing can go fuck itself, he decides as he pads into the bathroom and joins Tony, wrapping his arms around him in a full nelson position, under the arms, hands up in his hair, mouth hot and hungry on his nape.

The sick feeling is still there, even as he sinks to his knees and turns Tony around, sucks him down. In this, he’s helpless, as weak as a child who cannot breathe without assistance. He can’t stop himself, and a part of him doesn’t want to.

With his name broken on Tony’s cursing lips, Steve finds he doesn’t care. He’ll take the bitterness on his tongue, the heat in his throat, the burning of his eyes against the pounding water of the shower, the sting of Tony tearing at his hair, the assault of blood in his ears and the gutting shout of release Tony makes, the roaring obliteration of self as his orgasm leaves him emptier still.

After, in the steamy heat of the bathroom, cold tile beneath his feet, he stares into the fogbound mirror and sees only a shadow of himself and Tony a smaller shadow beside him.

“It’s not you,” Tony promises, his voice wrecked from shouting. “It’s—”

“Are you breaking up with me?” Steve interrupts. Even he knows what comes next; it’s a script older than he is.

“I should. I really should. It’s better for you if I—”

“You don’t get to decide what’s better for me.”

“Hiding this is going to kill you.”

“I’m a super-soldier. I’ll heal.”

That’s a lie, and they both know it, but as Steve holds his breath, Tony lets him tell it.

“Will you let me change your mind?” Steve asks, quieter, tracing a streaking image of the arc reactor into the steam of the mirror, revealing a sliver of Tony’s eyes, a slash of his red lips, the barest movement of his throat as he swallows.

“I thought I did,” Tony tries.

Steve shakes his head, inscribes a dripping star and shield beside the dissolving reactor on the glass.

“You didn’t mean it. You have to mean it.”

“I mean…this,” Tony confesses, drawing an elegant ampersand between the two weeping symbols on the mirror. He swallows again, audible in the pent quiet of the room. “Us.”

“Okay,” Steve says, thinking maybe he understands a little, at least, thinking maybe there’s a chance for them after all.

Steve erases his artwork with a single, decisive swipe, which leaves them standing side by side, not touching, but still staring into one another’s eyes.

“Okay,” Tony echoes, reaching out to take Steve’s hand.


End file.
